Don’t Stop Snowing

A deeply personal and funny novel from the winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award, about embracing one’s own troubled self, demons and all. Perfect for readers of Percival Everett, Kevin Wilson, and Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans.

Fresh out of grad school in Michigan, on the brink of despair, directionless, David worries his parents. They don’t know how to heal him. His doctor suggests that he needs to gain some perspective, and possibly a relocation would help. Maybe there is such a thing as a geographical cure?

Snowy, grey Buffalo is not the first place that comes to mind when you think of a curative place, but maybe time with his cousin Flip will help David to forget his own troubled past. But as it turns out, Flip’s life and state of mind is even unsteadier than his own. Suddenly enlisted to take care of his cousin and to even fill in for him at his job, David falls into a new life and a new way of seeing the world. A world where, come to think of it, he doesn’t mind the snow.

Don’t Stop Snowing is a fresh and honest—and funny—story of the struggles we all face as we realize that we don’t just inherit eye, hair, and skin color, but also the complicated psyches of our parents.

• “Placeless anonymity breeds an odd intimacy . . .  David’s narration routinely has a depth of insight, about identity, the fragility of family and the tragedies into which we’re all born. This is delivered with such elegant ease that it sneaks up on readers, who may find themselves tearing up, as I did more than once. Having met David in middle age at the start, we understand that he will survive the long winter and make sense of the blues in his brain. So we experience each intimate encounter, each new love we know will not last, as he does: a reason to live.”
  New York Times Book Review
• “His best book yet—a mapping of literature onto life that's fun and aching in equal measure...Joycean, Buffalonian, Bumpian.”
  Ed Park, author of Same Bed, Different Dreams
• “Raised by two academics — a white modernist scholar father who is an alcoholic dreamer and a Black mother, a historian who’s far more grounded — David is in a driftless period of his 20s. As a remedy, he drives to Buffalo to stay with his cousin Flip, who ends up taking him along on a bender of his own. Bump’s work is consistently interesting . . . and this one, a meditation on parental inheritance set in a frozen world, feels especially engaging.”
  Emma Alpern, Vulture
• "Bump (Everywhere You Don’t Belong) spins an affecting story of a young man’s efforts to escape from the shadow of his brilliant but troubled father. . . . The contrasts between the relative comfort of David’s bourgeois upbringing and the hardscrabble realities of working-class Buffalo sharpen the tale. It’s a memorable portrait of a young man who finds refuge in literature.”"
  Publishers Weekly
• “Don’t Stop Snowing…shows us that while literature and art can provide a temporary refuge from our despair, it’s only through community and our participation in it that we can find salvation…. [it] offers us a communal vision of what healing can look like. It’s a book that reminds us that although the path forward is circuitous, messy, and indeterminate, the strangers we encounter along the way will help guide us to where we need to be. It is the perfect novel for those that intellectualize their feelings instead of engaging with them because it reminds us that sometimes the answers we need aren’t in the books, but in the people.”
  Ricardo Pierre-Louis, Chicago Review of Books
• “Heartfelt. . . . Bump beautifully illustrates how the accumulation of small human interactions can comfort a troubled soul and clear a path for change. . . . This beautiful episodic meditation on family, healing, and finding purpose is highly recommended for all literary fiction collections.”
  Library Journal
• “Bump suggests that books can offer a refuge and sense of order that messy humans usually fail to provide . . . Typical for Bump, there are some entertainingly absurdist scenes . . .  David’s biracial identity (his mother is Black, his father white) is just one example of the dualities Bump explores throughout the book: working-class and ivory tower, sober and using, snow and sunshine. . .  a compassionate portrait of a man slogging through ‘academic emotional molasses’ to something like true feeling. A quirky but affecting story of reshaping oneself outside of one’s parents’ mold.”
  
  
   
  Kirkus Reviews